Ten minutes.
Jordan had been at it for a full ten minutes, and he was starting to appreciate what a technical achievement this actually was.
Suppressing his strength to ordinary human levels wasn't something he practiced regularly. The fine motor control required—holding back that much power while still delivering consequences—was genuinely demanding. Like performing microsurgery while wearing oven mitts. The margin between "lesson learned" and "structural damage incompatible with continued breathing" was narrower than most people appreciated.
One slip. That's all it would take.
One slip and we're doing paperwork instead of physics.
But that was exactly why the Super Healing card existed. Every time the blond man started looking more like a crime scene than a person, a pulse of warm golden light washed over him—color returning to his face, swelling receding, consciousness snapping back like a rubber band. Good as new. Better than new, honestly. Jordan was fairly certain the man's chronic lower back pain had resolved somewhere around minute four.
If you can't quite kill someone, Jordan thought, landing another measured strike, at least make sure they leave healthier than they arrived.
It was elegant, really. The bug had been fixed. Jordan could now apply appropriate educational emphasis to ordinary civilians without any unfortunate permanent consequences. He felt good about this development.
The blond man did not feel good about this development.
By the end of the ten minutes, the rented room had been thoroughly redecorated. Jordan surveyed the results—furniture rearranged by physics, a laptop that had experienced a perspective shift, wallpaper with new texture—and raised one finger.
Three soft pulses of green-white light. Namekian Magic: Full Restoration.
The room reassembled itself. Every surface returned to its original condition. Even the flies came back.
Jordan looked down at the blond man sitting in the middle of it all—dazed, thoroughly humbled, not a single bruise remaining, and somehow in better physical condition than when the evening started.
"You're going to retract everything," Jordan said. Not a question.
The blond man's head moved up and down. Enthusiastically.
"Good."
Jordan grabbed him by the collar, hauled him to his feet, and escorted him out of the building. The landlord's apartment was quiet. Jordan noted this and moved quickly.
The pre-dawn air was cool and clear.
Jordan left the man standing on the sidewalk with his knees still uncertain about their structural integrity, and headed home.
He'd received Lanny's report before he even reached his own building—a concise brief, professionally delivered, covering the full scope of the online situation around Caped Baldy.
Jordan read it twice on the walk back.
Hm.
The coordinated nature of it was more organized than random internet malice. Someone had either seeded the initial threads or was actively amplifying them. The sheer volume pointed to infrastructure he didn't associate with ordinary forum trolls.
But Lanny was already moving. Legal pressure, takedown requests, real-name compilation. She knew her job.
And Jordan had, separately, already processed roughly a hundred individuals through the Heroes Association's disciplinary pipeline over the past few weeks. Association leadership elements, bad actors, people who'd confused institutional power for personal immunity. He was quite practiced at the follow-up paperwork by now.
The trolls I can handle tonight, Jordan thought. The structural problem gets handled another way.
He filed it and went to sleep.
Saitama's Apartment. Afternoon.
The morning had been a standard operational day. Jordan, Saitama, and Genos had swept their district—four Wolf-level monsters dealt with before noon, two theft incidents handled on the way back, one attempted mugging that ended immediately when the would-be mugger looked up and recognized who he was trying to mug.
Small work. Important work. The city was full of people going about ordinary lives, and the only thing standing between ordinary and catastrophic was people doing exactly this, every day, without drama.
They'd received a lot of thank-yous.
It always caught Jordan slightly off-guard, even now. A grandmother pressing both his hands. A teenager who'd seen the motorcycle incident on the news and wanted to say something in person. A convenience store owner who brought out cold drinks without being asked.
The world is more broken than it was, Jordan thought, walking home with Genos. But it's still got more of this than the other thing.
Saitama had run ahead to the supermarket for a sale that ended at five. He was already home when Jordan and Genos arrived, sitting cross-legged on the tatami in his battle suit, surrounded by an explosion of opened envelopes and a large, substantially unpacked cardboard box.
He was reading a letter with the mild confusion of a man who had opened the wrong door and wasn't sure how to leave.
"...What even is all this?"
He turned to the next envelope. Opened it. Read it. His expression didn't change, exactly, but something behind his eyes made a quiet adjustment.
Another one. Read it. Set it down.
Genos, coming through the doorway, caught a glimpse of the letter in Saitama's hand.
His systems ran a rapid processing cycle.
What he read was—
His metal fingers curled. The sound of stressed alloy filled the room.
Slander. Deliberate, fabricated, coordinated slander directed at a man who had single-handedly prevented three structural collapses in the past month and whose only complaint about any of it was that the monsters smelled bad.
Genos took out his phone with one hand. His other hand was still making sounds.
I will remember every address on every one of these letters, he thought, photographing each return address with surgical precision. Every single one.
"Saitama and Genos."
Jordan dropped down from the balcony in one easy motion, changed into his indoor slippers at the entrance, and stepped into the main room.
Genos straightened immediately. "Jordan."
Saitama set down a half-opened envelope and raised a hand in greeting. "You're back. Where's your little girlfriend?"
"Tatsumaki." Jordan picked up a packet of dried seaweed from the counter and opened it. "She's been staying over for a few days. Headed back to City A this afternoon to rest."
Saitama's eyes lit up. It was the specific brightness of a man who had spotted an opportunity.
"So you're single again starting today?"
Jordan's gaze turned flat. "What kind of logic is that? I'm not a scumbag."
"Being single means doing single-man things!" Saitama sat up straighter, with the energy of someone who had been building to this recommendation for some time. He pumped his fist. "Which obviously means going to a friend's house to play games!"
He turned to Genos with the certainty of a man who knew exactly what his disciple was going to say.
Genos straightened. "Teacher is absolutely right."
These two, Jordan thought.
"Playing games is fine," he said. "We can head to M-City later and see if King-san's around. But—" He paused, looking at the scattered letters and half-demolished cardboard box on the tatami floor. "Before that."
Saitama stood up and started reaching for his cloak clasp to change clothes. He stopped at the word before.
"What is it?"
Jordan looked at the cardboard box. At the letters. At the general landscape of paper scattered across the floor like the aftermath of a bureaucratic explosion.
Why is this still here?
He raised two fingers.
Saitama registered the gesture and immediately reached out to stop him—"Wait—!"
A precise thread of golden light extended from Jordan's fingertip, looped neatly around every envelope, every sheet of folded paper, and the cardboard box itself.
They vanished.
Completely.
In the sudden absence of several kilograms of paper, the room looked substantially better.
Saitama stared at where his mail had been. His hand was still extended in the air where it had been trying to stop Jordan.
"...I was going to check if any of the thank-you letters were in there," he said, with the specific tone of a man who had not gotten to the end of his mail and would now never know.
Jordan paused.
Hm.
He raised his hand again.
The same golden light extended. A pause of approximately half a second.
Every envelope reappeared. Every sheet of paper. The cardboard box, fully intact, sitting exactly where it had been.
"There you go." Jordan lowered his hand. "I didn't touch a thing."
Saitama and Genos stared at the restored pile of mail.
—Is that even physically possible? ×2
"...Fine. I'll deal with it later." Saitama looked at the mess with a complicated expression, shook his head slowly, and exhaled. "Superpowers are really something."
"Alright, stop stalling." Jordan patted him on the shoulder. Saitama hadn't finished changing—still in his battle suit, still geared up. Jordan looked at Genos. "Genos, hold down the apartment for a bit. We'll be back."
Genos's instincts and his household management responsibilities conducted a brief internal negotiation. The household management arm won.
"...Understood. I'll protect Sensei's apartment."
Saitama was already being steered toward the door, looking back over his shoulder.
"What? Are we going somewhere already?"
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